A Lonely Song of Love
by DrMeh
Summary: It's a name of power, he thinks, repeating it until it doesn't sound like a name anymore, but a delicate pattern of sounds, almost like music.


**a/n**: My Valentine Santa's Harem present for kagomesweetheart101. Hope you like it!

I do not own Teen Titans, am not making money with this, and please do not steal my writing. Reviews make my day.

* * *

A Lonely Song (of love)

_Love makes your soul crawl out of its hiding place._

Zora Neale Hurston

* * *

Starfire. S-T-A-R-F-I-R-E. He finds himself repeating the name over and over, as if learning a new word, taking care to shape the vowels and pronounce the syllables, feeling their rhythm vibrate. It's a name of power, he thinks, repeating it until it doesn't sound like a name anymore, but a delicate pattern of sounds, almost like music.

She _is _music. He doesn't realize it until he really looks at her one day, watches the lines of her fingers flex and move gracefully as she writes a note to Raven, feels the feathery silk of her hair glide between his knuckles when he pulls it jokingly; listens to her voice, smooth and pleasant as it swings from high to low notes, gains or loses degrees of warmth.

He watches her so much that eventually her very presence meets the same fate as her name: ascended into patterns of lines, vibrations, and the glow of her eyes and skin. But these patterns are not delicate. They're wild, free-formed; shining and pulsing with beauty that catches his breath in his throat unfailingly, until he can't breathe when she stands close, like now…

"Robin," she says to him, eyebrows arching when he doesn't reply. "Robin?" She moves even closer, until he can feel the heat radiating from her bare arm, and he feels warmed and chilled at once.

He forces himself to reply. "Starfire." A song of power.

"I am in a worried state concerning friend Raven," she confesses, and he notes the way her narrow shoulders angle downwards, a surefire way to tell her distress. Her body sings her thoughts, emotions. He wonders if she knows this.

"Worry has no medical value," he says, and flinches when her fist thumps his arm, nearly sending him flying. "Ow," he comments mildly, shifting away when she leans close (too close).

"Are you doing the kidding with me? Robin, I wish to speak of this in a serious manner," she frowns, and he has to stop himself from touching her face, tracing the lines and contours of a new world (star).

"I'm serious, too," he replies. "Raven's tough, and she can take care of herself. We just have to help however we can."

"How do we help?" Her eyes widen; she is deep in thought.

"By worrying," he deadpans, and grins when color stains her cheeks.

"Oh, you!" she laughs and waves a fist at him, but she's smiling now and the pattern shines so brightly he has to blink.

* * *

Raven is, of course, the first to notice, or at least the first to say something about it. "You shouldn't watch her so much," the saturnine girl tells him one morning over coffee.

He takes another sip of bitter drink. "Why?"

"It's dangerous to get too close," she warns him, and they both smirk at the cliché. "All I'm saying is," she continues, stirring absently, "is to be careful."

He wants to say it's too late, but by this point it doesn't matter, so he just passes the sugar.

* * *

When he first sees Starfire, he doesn't yet know her name but immediately he thinks of a fallen star. She's pretty and looks so tired and lost that his intuition jumps to helping her. All his training, his caution is discarded, because behind the angry green glow, he sees a faint glimmer of tears and detects a slight grit in her voice, as though she's too afraid to even cry.

He calmly detaches her handcuffs with a smile, hoping to put her to ease, and is rewarded with the glow fading away to reveal a face shadowed with uncertainty, and a calculating look in slightly shiny eyes. It intrigues him as much as it unnerves him, so he redirects his attention to moving his foot away as the heavy metal falls to the ground.

"There," he says, giving her a smile. "Now we can be-"

She pulls him roughly to her, kisses him firmly, and Robin would never admit it to anyone but even years later he cannot forget how his heart shoots to the sky like it has never done before. Moments(hours) later, she pushes him away, and he is so startled that he sprawls to the ground, staring up at her, his face tingling.

Robin would never admit it to anyone, but it is not nothing to him. It is _something_, and it keeps a special, secret place deep in his mind he tries not to think of, until some time later in Tokyo.

"Starfire, why did you…" _Betray _me. "Kiss that guy?"

"Oh," she smiles, so delighted, "the people of my planet are able to learn any language instantaneously through lip contact." She points at her mouth as if to illustrate, and his eyes are drawn immediately to it, narrowing with realization.

"Great," he echoes.

(A special, secret place deep in his heart dies that day.)

* * *

Stars are burning, always burning, and getting too close or too far is fatal, and he thinks it too ironic that she is so fittingly named.

Robin is not stupid, by any means. Analysis is his forte, and he has to carefully balance his thoughts against the threat of over-analysis. Certainly he's analyzed his relationships with all of the Titans, both as friends and as teammates. It is easy to figure this out; their personalities and roles have come to melt into a well-oiled machine. He can easily name each member's part, and exactly how they depend on each other.

Starfire, for some reason, doesn't fit in this scheme, neither as a friend nor a teammate. While himself and the others are like the various parts of a machine, defined and labeled, she is like the material needed to create the framework. Though her role is impossible for him to define, if he tries taking it away, the whole team falls apart.

Though her importance to him is impossible to define, if he tries taking her away, he falls apart.

This burns him like nothing else, because she is very much like a star, and he can't get too close because he's so afraid and uncertain of where it might lead him, because he's really just a normal guy and normal guys can't get _involved_ or whatever with _alien princesses_ while being charged with the safety of an entire freakin' _city _(they pretend it doesn't mean the whole world) and not expect it to go horribly wrong somewhere.

"There is nothing more," he says flatly, pulling her hand from his face (it's burning) and he's glad he's wearing a mask because the lie is burning in his eyes. "A hero is what I am, and if you don't like it-"

"Well, then," she tells him solemnly, and the shine in her eyes is fading like the glow did so long ago. "I like it more than you'll ever know."

He watches as she flies away, and he knows that he's made her cry but he forces his body to stay still, even though he wants to jump after her and explain every little thing in his mind and the big things too, if she'll still listen.

Because you see, he can't get too far away either, because her (star)fire warms him and gives him life, and taking it away would be just as condemning as if the sun refused to come out one day.

"Starfire?" A song of hope. They are sitting face-to-face in a simple Japanese building, and he is overcome with sudden recklessness, born from the lack of a mask he's learned to hide behind. He leans in to kiss her, but then Beast Boy barges in with a wicked grin that said he knew exactly what they were going to do, and Robin wants to strangle him as much as he wants to thank him. Later, he thinks that Beast Boy might have saved him from doing something rash, something not thought-out, not _analyzed_, which would almost certainly mean disaster because without analysis, he is nothing. (Nothing compared to her.)

Still, he (kindofmaybereally) hopes that it's a step.

* * *

"Starfire!" A song of beauty. Even covered in mud, battle-worn and completely in shambles, she is beautiful. Her hand rises with a groan from the ground, and he sees it like a flash of pale lightning that sends him running to help her up.

He helps the rain wipe away the dirt from her face with a stroke of his gloved hand against her skin, tucking the errant strands of flaming hair behind her ear. "Are you okay?" He wouldn't know what to do with himself if she wasn't.

"I am now," she tells him, and she says it with such gravity, different from her usual tones. He senses the pattern changing slightly; her song seems to have become a little bit softer, stronger. Is it because of him, his effect on her the way she affects him?

He sees in her shining, glowing eyes that it is so.

All the reasons he'd tried to keep away, they're clouding his vision. He doesn't really know what to say, so he is a little bit surprised but not really when the words spill from his mouth. "I think I was wrong before." Wrongwrongwrong.

She raises her hand to her hair, a gesture of uncertainty and rising hope. "You do?" she asks, disbelievingly.

"Maybe a hero isn't all that I am," he realizes, and looks away because he feels ashamed that he'd ever thought otherwise. "Maybe I could be… maybe we could be…" he trails off.

"Well, then?" she prompts him. It makes him want to smile because he's rambling and she knows it, and it's in this moment that she understands what he's trying to say completely.

(She really always has.)

"Starfire." A song of love.

"Stop talking."

That's a good idea, he thinks.


End file.
